How irritating is this?

[Rosinish]

Does this mean that unlike FTM there is no prompt to say it's wrong (on ancestry)?

Yes you do get a warning usually something like "The birth of the child is before that of the parent, do you want to proceed?" So obviously the tree owner just ignores that and enters it anyway.

I did think there was a prompt but couldn't remember & wasnt sure if the same applied for Tribalpages................have used both but not made any mistakes as I had it all done on FTM 

[pinefamily]

Ancestry public trees are not the only culprits for the continuation of misinformation. I remember Genes Reunited used to be the same.
And there are multiple Dowdeswell family trees out there that are incorrect, simply because no one had bothered to look at the original records. So all of these trees have an ancestry from a someone who died aged 12, from memory. I tried once to inform the originator of this tree, but to no avail.
Sometimes it's better to just quietly know what's right and wrong.

[Guy Etchells]

Several of my forebears lived and died in Gloucestershire. One in particular has appeared in many public trees on ancestry. His death, unsurprisingly, occurred in Glos. Someone has obviously googled  Glos and deduced that he died in Calvados, France. So he/she posted it into his/her tree. An understandable error for someone who's not a Brit researcher.

But what has got right up my hooter is that the entry has been copied blindly by six other alleged researchers. I've given up trying to point out boooboos of this type - there's only a limited amount of abuse I can take.

Trouble is that, as politicians continue to demonstrate, if you repeat an untruth often enough it becomes 'true'.   

While I agree it is mildly irritating it should not make any difference to the serious researcher, who after all checks original records and alternative records to confirm any possibilities.

This stands for all records no matter how old or recent they are.

Errors occur in Heralds Visitations, some accidental some blatant fraud, Census contain errors and indeed guesses and even Parish Registers and BMD Certificates contain errors.

An example of this last is a marriage certificate I bought for my mother's marriage, it had her maiden surname as IMY instead of GUY even though the register was perfectly clear what the maiden surname should have been.

It seems that criticising Ancestry (and other on line providers) has taken over from the criticism of the IGI which was common between the 1980s and 2012 but seems to have died down in recent years since the IGI has mainly dropped out of sight of most researchers.

Never accept any information at face value, always check the original record and also use other original records (as many as possible) to corroborate information found.
Cheers
Guy

[smudwhisk]

There are literally hundreds of trees on both ancestry and other websites that perpetuate the myth that Thomas Barsham of Oxwick and Thomas Barsham of Colkirk (both parishes in Norfolk) were one and the same person, in spite of the fact that many of their children were baptised in neighbouring parishes in the same years.   The parish records have been online on familysearch for a number of years now but there seems to be no end in the copying of these trees.  Its another great example of the myth that the more trees that state the fact. 

The two Thomas Barshams were first cousins; Thomas of Colkirk died in 1569 and Thomas of Oxwick's wife died the same year, so he then married his cousin's widow.  I suspect this hasn't helped but then these trees seem to have conveniently overlooked Thomas of Oxwick's first marriage and his second (of four marriages) to his cousin's widow, otherwise you would have thought they might have seen the light. 

What also hasn't helped is the familysearch have supposedly extracted the baptisms for both parishes but list the children of Thomas of Oxwick as baptised in Oxwick but as being resident at the time in Colkirk.  The fact that the actual entry from the digitised copy of their own microfilm of the original parish register (not the BTs or Archdeacon's Transcripts) does not state anything of the sort, does make you wonder why familysearch have added this information to their website.  It would seem that all the tree owners have never bothered to consult the original regsiters or they would have seen that it was inaccurate.

This is another good example of why anyone serious about researching their own family tree really does need to see the original records rather than relying on 3rd party transcripts and other "published" information.  Mistakes can and do get made, although in the case of some you do wonder why the mistake has been made.

[majm]

Lisa, I have Stinchcombes in Hawkesbury as well but a very long way back.

We are probably connected somehow - there are quite a few of them! In Hawkesbury genealogy circles...... I'm also related to the Thompsons, Martens, Tandys, and Always, amongst others in Hawkesbury.

I forgot to mention that in NSW Australia there's the very famous, historical district of Hawkesbury and through that district is the very important river, the Hawkesbury River.  The Hawkesbury district has been the food bowl for Sydney NSW for over 200 years.   And the Hawkesbury family history group is one of the leading fh groups in NSW.  And there's Thompson, Martens, Tandy as surnames in the NSW Hawkesbury district    which includes : Llandilo, Londonderry, Windsor, Richmond, Pitt Town,  Cornwallis, Grose Wold, and of course many other localities too.